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Out of the thousands of refugees who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one group is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

One woman, who we'll call Amina is among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against violence against women.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she added, her voice cracking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera settlement in south-eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the activities of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with often weak state authorities.

The conflict has been driven by a range of reasons, including the instability and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been mounting within and outside official channels about armed groups extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in Mali's north in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told media outlets anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to attack so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa warn about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from specific regions in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the UN said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, straining receiving areas with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the AES alliance, creating shared documents and coordinating defense plans.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more security measures will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel study in Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the army, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are banned for public use and authorities have also enlisted the help of villagers in intelligence-gathering.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation with a soldier from Mali (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact law enforcement to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, the country also stands accused of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found documents in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.